Bernier's People's Party of Canada promises drastic cuts to immigration

Maxime Bernier, leader of the fledgling People's Party of Canada, yesterday called Islamism or "political Islam" a threat to Canada's values and way of life. Introducing his party's policy on immigration -- the ballot question in the upcoming Canuckistan election -- he said denounced mass immigration and "extreme multiculturalism," which he said are really "a very dangerous type of social engineering" which would lead to "social conflicts and potentially violence."

M Bernier went on to say that Canada must look after its own citizens first, and focus on newcomers who bring economic value to the country. A People's Party government, he said, would slash immigration and refugee numbers, build a fence to block asylum seekers from walking across the border, and end a program that lets immigrants sponsor their families to join them. "I can understand why immigrants would want to bring the rest of their extended family here, including older ones who will benefit from our health-care system," his text read, "but we cannot be the welfare state of the planet."

He pledged to reduce the number of immigrants admitted to Canada each year to 100,000 or 150,000 at most, if the economy and "other circumstances" allow that many. That's less than half the number currently being "welcomed" by Canuckistan's Liberal government (Just In Trudeau, Prop.) The so-called Conservatives refuse to divulge their target number, but under the last Tory government of Steve Harpoon, the number of immigrants increased to 250,000. Saying most Canadians agree with him, M Bernier cited polls suggesting up to half of respondents think immigration levels are too high.

On the question of refugees and asylum-seekers -- the issue that has most Canadians, including legal immigrants, seething -- M Bernier pledged to build fences at popular crossings for migrants between official ports of entry -- including the notorious Roxham Road "gateway" near Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle QC -- and to rely on private sponsorships for funding new immigrants rather than government support. His speech said that a People's Party government would focus on religious minorities in Muslim-majority countries and "members of sexual minorities" instead of refugees identified by the United Nations.

Another plank in the PPC's immigration platform promises to make each immigration applicant go through a face-to-face interview with a Canadian official to judge the applicant's values and his or her acceptance of Canadian societal norms. M Bernier quoted Salim Mansour -- a PPC candidate in an Ontario riding, who happens to be a Muslim -- who has written that official multiculturalism is a lie. "A lie based on the idea that all cultures are equal," said the party leader. "A lie destructive of our Western liberal democratic heritage, traditions, and values based on individual rights and freedoms."

What happened to our society: Pat Buchanan's view

This is a follow-up to yesterday's post in which British writer Pat Condell summarized in under four minutes what went wrong with the society of the AABC countries (America, Australia, Britain and Canada). If you haven't seen the video, be sure to check it out. Today I want to share another summary, using the printed word this time, by another Pat -- Patrick J. Buchanan.

Mr Buchanan has been described as "America's leading populist conservative". He has been a senior advisor to three American presidents, ran for the Republican nomination in 1992 and 1996, and was the Reform Party's presidential candidate in 2000. What follows is excerpted from "The Last Chance", the final chapter of his best-selling book Suicide of a Superpower: Will America survive to 2025? (St. Martin's Press, 2011).

Our intellectual, cultural, and political elites are today engaged in one of the most audacious and ambitious experiments in history. They are trying to transform a Western Christian republic into an egalitarian democracy made up of all the tribes, races, creeds, and cultures of planet Earth.

They have dethroned our God, purged our cradle faith from public life, and repudiated the Judeo-Christian moral code by which previous generations sought to live.

They have declared men and women to be basically the same, that all voluntary sexual relations are morally equal, that the traditional family is but one social option, that men can marry men and women can marry women, that race is a social construct invented by bigots bent on repressing others, that all are endowed with the intelligence and ability to succeed in the most competitive society on earth.

All religions and all "lifestyles" are equal and all are to be equally respected. These elites will fight to ensure that a mosque is built at Ground Zero with the same ferocity as they will to ensure that no Nativity scene ever appears on the National Mall. If there is an inequality of rewards in our society, they believe, this is the residue of a reactionary America, the fruit of societal injustice, and it is the moral duty of our modern state to rectify that injustice and mandate equality. Those who reject these truths are benighted or bigoted.

Our secular elites believe in this revolution. The people never did. Middle America detests it. Thus it has had to be imposed from above, by judges, bureaucrats, professors, and those who control the content of our culture. One part of America believes we are headed for a wonderful new age. The silent majority thinks the country has lost its mind....

The experiment is failing and will continue to fail. For it is based on a theory which runs counter to reality, an ideology whose tenets are at war with the laws of nature. Like the Marxists who were going to create a new man and a new society, our establishment is attempting the impossible.

Our elites have created a concept of the ideal nation -- the most egalitarian, diverse, democratic, and liberated that ever existed. And they have mobilized the vast power of government and law to force America to conform to that concept. They will fail, and this great and good country will die of their experiment.

Why the Dow and S&P keep rising and Canadian markets suck

Canadian readers who play the stock markets are painfully aware that their portfolios of Canuck stocks are not keeping up with inflation, whereas investments in Donald Trump's America keep going up and up. Before the bell this morning, the Dow stood at 26,430.57 while the TSX languished at 15,854.05, in spite of the frenzy for cannabis stocks and the generally good economic numbers coming out of the Great No-longer-white North.

Why is this? George Athanassakos, a professor of finance and the Ben Graham Chair in Value Investing at the University of Western Ontario's Richard Ivey School of Business, has the answer. He calls it "the Trudeau effect". According to Prof. Athanassakos, statistics measuring employment, production and the like paint a picture of the economy as it is. Today's picture may be rosy enough, he says, but investors are thinking about tomorrow and the next day, trying to predict whether things will get better or worse. And when they look at the policies and actions of Just In Trudeau's Liberal government, they are not encouraged, so they don't pile into an "iffy" market.

The professor's thesis is nicely summed up in "The 'Trudeau Effect' dragging down Canada's stock markets just got much, much worse", published in Canada's Financial Post today. It's so good that I'm going to repost the whole thing, hoping that the Post and the prof won't mind. [We don't make any money from WWW -- not one red cent! Ed.] Here `tis. The emphasis is mine.

A few months ago I wrote in these pages about the “Trudeau effect,” my term for the serious underperformance of the Canadian stock market vis-à-vis the American markets since the election of the federal Liberal government under Justin Trudeau.

The differential market performance has become even more pronounced since I wrote that article, especially in the last three months. Over the last two years, as of the end of September 2018, State Street’s SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (ticker: SPY), which is designed to track the S&P 500, outperformed its Canadian equivalent, the iShares S&P TSX 60 Index ETF (ticker: XIU) by about 11.5 per cent on an annual basis. But from July to September 2018, we have seen the U.S. market index outperform the Canadian stock index by a whopping 28.8 per cent annualized.

One might ask: Why look at the stock market and not the performance of the economy? Indeed, Canada’s economic performance is one of the best in the G7 while the stock market has been a laggard. So what is a better gauge of successful management of the economy and the country? Should economic performance not be highly correlated with the stock market?”

In reality, the stock market discounts the future not the current economic performance. And Canada’s future looks less than clear under the stewardship of this Liberal government.

Trudeau and his ministers have made it clear they want corporations to become benevolent organizations that put workers before shareholders. They favour taxing corporations and the rich, and adding regulatory impediments and red tape to corporate activity. They are big supporters of income redistribution as opposed to making the pie bigger for everyone. They want to regulate the economy and nudge corporations to submit to the Liberal government’s social views and economic philosophy.

Their policies take away economic entrepreneurship and wealth creation and replace it with handouts to every significant lobby and activist group. The Liberal government increasingly seems not to understand how people get jobs and how they get by, and how heavily favouring environmental issues stirred up by activists over economic concerns takes jobs away.

There’s an old saying that if you’re not a communist at the age of 20 you haven’t got a heart and if you’re still a communist at the age of 40, you haven’t got a brain. Canada today seems to be run by politicians in their 40s behaving like they’re in their 20s. Focusing only on the environment or on social engineering at the expense of working families is elitist. And Canadians are getting the sense that they are governed by a bunch of idealistic and dogmatic college students convinced they will save the world.

The Liberals have crossed swords with powerful countries. They have antagonized the United States, Russia, China, India and Saudi Arabia, just to mention a few. But a small country like Canada has to co-operate with powerful countries, not sit and judge them disapprovingly from some moral high horse. And progress takes time. Improvements to society and the world happen incrementally, not instantaneously.

When a democratically elected majority government ends up following policies driven by activists, it is neglecting its larger mission and mandate and that will eventually hurt the economy. This is what the stock market is anticipating.

Footnote: The photo of Mr Socks making cow eyes at George Soros did not appear in the Post!